Winner of the Prix de Rome and the National Jewish Book Award, these ten stories and the title novella, "Ellis Island," exhibit tremendous range and versatility of style and technique, yet are closely unified in their beauty and in their concern with enduring and universal questions. PRAISE FOR ELLIS ISLAND "It's genius. . . . Ellis Island ascends to the peak of literary achievement." - The Boston Globe "Such an ambitious reach is almost unheard of in our short fiction." - The New York Times Book Review "Constant brilliance . . . Rarely less than breathtaking . . . every single story sings with purity, vibrates with light."- The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) These ten stories and the title novella, Ellis Island, exhibit a tremendous range and versatility of style and technique and yet are closely unified in their beauty and in their concern with enduring and universal questions. "It's genius . . . Ellis Island ascends to the peak of literary achievement." -- The Boston Globe "Such an ambitious reach is almost unheard of in our short fiction." -- New York Times Book Review "Constant brilliance . . . Rarely less than heartbreaking . . . every single story sings with purity, vibrates with light." -- Cleveland Plain Dealer "Stories beyond compare . . . [Helprin's] imagination should be protected by some intellectual equivalent of the National Park Service." -- Philadelphia Inquirer Mark Helprin is the author of, among other titles, the New York Times best-sellers Winter's Tale and A Soldier of the Great War. Mark Helprin  is the acclaimed author of Winter's Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, The Oceans and the Stars, Freddy and Fredericka, The Pacific, Ellis Island, Memoir from Antproof Case, and numerous other works. His novels are read around the world, translated into over twenty languages. The Schreuderspitze IN MUNICH are many men who look like weasels. Whether by genetic accident, meticulous crossbreeding, an early and puzzling migration, coincidence, or a reason that we do not know, they exist in great numbers. Remarkably, they accentuate this unfortunate tendency by wearing mustaches, Alpine hats, and tweed. A man who resembles a rodent should never wear tweed. One of these men, a commercial photographer named Franzen, had cause to be exceedingly happy. "Herr Wallich has disappeared," he said to Huebner, his supplier of paper and chemicals. "You needn't bother to send him bills. Just send them to the police. The police, you realize, were here on two separate occasions!" "If the two occasions on which the police have been here had not been separate, Herr Franzen, they would have been here only once." "What do you mean? Don't toy with me. I have no time for semantics. In view of the fact that I knew Wallich at school, and professionally, they sought my opinion on his disappearance. They wrote down everything I said, but I do not think that they will find him. He left his studio on the Neuhausstrasse just as it was when he was working, and the landlord has put a lien on the equipment. Let me tell you that he had some fine equipment-very fine. But he was not such a great photographer. He didn't have that killer's instinct. He was clearly not a hunter. His canine teeth were poorly developed; not like these," said Franzen, baring his canine teeth in a smile which made him look like an idiot with a mouth of miniature castle towers. "But I am curious about Wallich." "So is everyone. So is everyone. This is my theory. Wallich was never any good at school. At best, he did only middling well. And it was not because he had hidden passions, or a special genius for some field outside the curriculum. He tried hard but found it difficult to grasp several subjects; for him, mathematics and physics were pure torture. "As you know, he was not wealthy, and although he was a nice-looking fellow, he was terribly short. That inflicted upon him great scars-his confidence, I mean, because he had none. He could do things only gently. If he had to fight, he would fail. He was weak. "For example, I will use the time when he and I were competing for the Heller account. This job meant a lot of money, and I was not about to lose. I went to the library and read all I could about turbine engines. What a bore! I took photographs of turbine blades and such things, and seeded them throughout my portfolio to make Herr Heller think that I had always been interested in turbines. Of course, I had not even known what they were. I thought that they were an Oriental hat. And now that I know them, I detest them. "Naturally, I won. But do you know how Wallich approached the competition? He had some foolish ideas about mother-of-pearl nautiluses and other seashells. He wanted to show how shapes of things mechanical were echoes of shapes in nature. All very fine, but Herr Heller pointed out that if the public were to see photographs of mother-of-pearl shells contrasted with photographs of his engines, his engines would com